Many communication networks rely upon tangible communication links (e.g., twisted pair copper cabling, coaxial cable, optical fiber) to provide a transmission medium between nodes of the network. While physical communication links provide numerous benefits such as speed and security, such links are vulnerable to defects or breakage that can degrade or destroy network functionality. Such defects are expensive in terms of both the labor and time required to locate and repair the link, in addition to the cost of loss of service during this time. Accordingly, it is of the utmost of importance to be able to efficiently monitor and troubleshoot network communication links to ensure network availability.
One device commonly used for characterizing optical fiber is an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). An OTDR can perform a variety of tasks with optical fiber, including estimating the fiber's length, estimating overall attenuation, and estimating locations of faults. The OTDR injects optical signals into the fiber, parts of which are reflected back towards the OTDR device. These back reflected (i.e., backscattered) OTDR signals allow the OTDR to perform calculations to estimate the length of the fiber and estimate physical locations of faults in the fiber.
In many applications, OTDRs are centralized within a few locations in the network. However, OTDRs have limitations regarding how large of a fiber-optic cable plant can be supported with respect to the lengths of fiber utilized and the number of node hops involved. In other applications, portable OTDR devices are manually utilized by service personnel, but this configuration is especially expensive in terms of time and labor cost (as manual human labor is required). Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a semi-automatic or fully-automatic solution for detecting and localizing network faults without the need for human intervention or additional hardware components. Further, it would be desirable to have such a solution that works for both optical and metallic cabling.